Let me be my own fool, a counterpoint, if you will, to Sinatra's "I did it my way." Just what the hell any of us are doing is the question.

Earlier this year--August, I guess--I experienced the magic circle, certainly not the first time I'd ever done so, but it was the first time that I attempted to deconstruct the experience whilst in the midst of it, with the explicit purpose of creating a sort of standard operating procedure for future reference. Actually the singular procedure is as follows: leave it alone; or go with the flow; or ride, Sally, ride. They all equivicate.

There is no magic circle for me today, which is somewhat of a positive fortune, I think. No need to repeat that so soon. But there is another kind of geometry at work, and another kind of occult-ish phenomena. Refraction? Refarction? Go ahead, make words up.

Case in point: yesterday I went out on what would prove to be the last date of a short-lived liaison about which I myself was feeling ambivalent but not necessarily so ambivalent as to have closed the door on the situation that very day, particularly as just days earlier I had worked assiduously to extricate myself from a foot-in-mouth situation that threatened the very outcome that I had hoped to avoid--at least until I was certain of my own desired outcome. I was beaten to the punch, not in that I wasn't the first to deliver the news (though I wasn't), but in that I wasn't the first to reach the foregone conclusion (which bums me out a little bit but only in an ego sense: if someone says to you "I'm not interested in you in that way" you wanna be able to say "well, I wasn't interested in you in that way before you weren't interested in me in that way" and not have it sound like the sour grapes that it is even if it isn't. But I blew that and could only cover by offering a refreshment whilst hoping that she would decline because I didn't really have anything in the house). Does it matter? Not really. That's the nature of ambivalence after all. But in the awkward closing moments before she walked out the door, she asked, "so what are you gonna do tonight?" I hadn't thought, let alone felt, that far in advance, having had it all backwards. (See Tsvetayeva: "It's precisely for feeling that one needs time, and not for thought.")